actionable marketing guide

Dear ,

The unexpectedly warm weather, at least for New York in February, feels like having a bonus day-off.

My husband and I considered trekking out to a local beach except we were scared off by a menacing storm on Saturday. It brought chilling weather back.

Personally, I haven’t had a lot of time to spend outside. I’m in the midst of cleaning out and preparing to sell a house in the suburbs.

Like many things in my life, I’ve found the experience of selling a house a true lesson in marketing.

Since real estate especially in the New York metro-area is big business, this shouldn’t be a surprise.

Real estate marketing is grounded in the 4Ps of marketing: Product, Place, Price and Promotion.

The difference between selling a house and other high involvement, high investment products like cars is there’s generally a more limited market place and the options aren’t always comparable.

As products, houses are defined by:

• Type of house (For example ranch or colonial)
• Number of rooms
• Number of baths
• Lot size (Amount of land)

In terms of place, houses attributes include:

• Neighborhood
• Commute
• Schools
• Taxes

To price, a house you must consider:

• Comparable nearby recent sales (generally within the last 12 months)
• Timing (house buying seasons tends to be April-May and September-October)
• Competition includes available inventory relative to demand.

To promote your house sale, you depend on:

• Staging your house to help potential buyers visualize their lives there.
• Local media (online and offline) to broaden your audience.
• Open houses for brokers and/or prospects to see the house.

While I’m only selling one house, the process has been an education.

From the prospect's perspective, the house has to have the basics. Namely, it’s got to be within their budget and have the minimum amount of space needed.  But there are a lot of attributes that sway buyers.

Most people buy homes based on intangible reasons.

They fall in love with some aspect of the house and their vision for their life.

It’s about how the house makes them feel. My dad loved our first house. Turning his car into the driveway was a special moment for him. Everyone in the car could feel his spirits lift.

When I bought my place in the city, I spent a lot of time looking at apartments. I negotiated for different apartments. Then I saw the apartment I wound up buying. It was love at first sight. My mother told me she knew this was the one. It was the only time I said, “I’m buying this apartment.”

You’re probably wondering where the marketing lesson is.

Beyond the refresher course in the marketing 4Ps, ask yourself, “What sets my product or service apart?” Specifically, what makes it special for my target audience?

If you can’t answer this question, you’ll have a difficult time marketing your business.

This question can be particularly difficult for readily available products (both online and offline) and for services that are hard to productize. You must be able to make your offering real to your audience and give them a reason to purchase from you. 

To this end, talk to your current prospects and customers. The objective is to see how they view your offering, NOT to bend your services to their specific needs.

As many of you know, I’m an avid knitter.  My husband kids, “Have yarn, Heidi will travel.”

Beyond some of the special yarn festivals and our travels outside of New York, most of my purchases are made at my favorite LYS (knitting-speak for local yarn store), Knitty City.  I generally pay full retail for my purchases, some of which I could get cheaper online.

But Knitty City provides a warm, hospitable environment and community that I can’t match elsewhere. I feel at home there.

As a quick reminder, I’ll be at Social Media Marketing World 2017 in San Diego next month. I’m teaching a workshop entitled, “How To Create Quality Blog Posts Consistently”.

Until next week.

Happy Marketing
Heidi.

Heidi Cohen
Actionable Marketing Guide

Why You Need Influencer Relations Marketing Now

7 Step Marketing Framework

• Heidi Cohen was referenced in the Search Engine People’s useful blog post, Jaw-Dropping 2017 B2B Content Marketing Controversies (and What Can You Do About Them).  The author analyzed Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 Predictions, a meaty piece of roundup content. They spotlighted the differences and other highpoints using data to make their point. It’s a great example of how to create content based on other people’s research or roundups.
  
  
• Heidi Cohen weighed in on the 2017 ecommerce trends along with 18 other experts.

Ten Ways to Use Customer Lifetime Value to Reinvent Your Marketing Strategy

Measuring and using Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) data correctly provides marketers unprecedented insights to predict everything from the individual spend of a particular customer to quarterly sales growth.

CLV insights can help you to attract high-margin customers, target clusters of customers with untapped value, and retain high-value customers on the verge of churning.

This marketing brief from Zodiac Metrics explores ten ways you can use CLV modeling to improve many aspects of your business, including customer acquisition, retention, targeting, and forecasting.

​​​​OptinMonster is the best lead-generation plugin for WordPress. It allows you to create WordPress popups, floating footer bars, slide-ins, sidebar forms, and after-post forms, while giving you the ability to A/B test, add page-level targeting, and do so much more.
​

Here, at the Actionable Marketing Guide, using OptinMonster has resulted in a dramatic increase in subscriptions for this newsletter and other marketing projects.